Abe Pike and the Ghon-ya.
Old Abe had strolled over to my place to see a new Harvester tried on a good crop of wheat. In the previous reaping season I had been left suddenly in the lurch by my Kaffirs, who had silently vanished in the night for other scenes without a word of explanation, or a single regret for the loss they would put me to, and I determined to be prepared in future for such another vagary. Hence the Harvester, which reaped the corn and bound up the sheaves, aided only by one man and a boy. We were just sweeping clear the last square in the small field when Abe came up and hung himself on the fence, with his back bent like a bow, and his toes hitched under the lower wire. There, all bunched up, he eyed the machine in silence.
“Well, Uncle, what do you think of it?” I said, with some pride, as the last sheaf was tossed on one side by the human-like grippers.
He looked at me vacantly, then climbed slowly down, examined the sheaf and the tie, and then took a look all round the country.
“Things is changing,” he said.
“Yes; this is the age of progress and electricity.”
“And snorting steam engines and that there man machine—that thing without a heart, or a stomach, or eyes to see. Where’s the good?”
“It is a labour-saving machine, and enables me to produce more.”
“’Tis all vanity, an’ foolishness, an laziness—that’s what. Laziness and pride,” and the old sinner, who never did a fair day’s work in a month, wore an air of virtuous indignation as he resumed his seat on the fence.
“Things is changing—that’s so; and mankind’s on the down track. Time was when a reaper would take his sickle and harken to the rustlin’ of the yaller corn as he cut his way along, with the smell o’ the yearth in his nostrils, and the sight of all manner o’ living insects below him. And bymby he would straighten his back and look away over the land, or at the shining layers behind, and then he would stoop to it again with the thoughts busy in his mind as bees about a comb concerning the going out of the wheat in waggons an’ trains, an’ ships across the sea to the feeding of the nations. An’ look at this yer cast-iron reaper; what’s it good for but to work for a cast-iron man? That’s what’s the world’s comin’ to, with all the people cast in a mould. I’m gwine home!”